tolerable. Now
the Hojo chief's second wife, Maki, had borne to him a daughter who
married Minamoto Tomomasa, governor of Musashi and lord constable of
Kyoto, in which city he was serving when history first takes
prominent notice of him. This lady Maki seems to have been of the
same type as her step-daughter, Masa. Both possessed high courage and
intellectual endowments of an extraordinary order, and both were
profoundly ambitious. Maki saw no reason why her husband, Hojo
Tokimasa, should lend all his great influence to support the
degenerate scions of one of his family in preference to the able and
distinguished representative of the other branch. Tomomasa was both
able and distinguished. By a prompt and vigorous exercise of military
talent he had crushed a Heike rising in Ise, which had threatened for
a time to become perilously formidable. His mother may well have
believed herself justified in representing to Hojo Tokimasa that such
a man would make a much better Minamoto shogun than the half-witted
libertine, Yoriiye, or the untried boy, Sanetomo. It has been
inferred that her pleading was in Tokimasa's ears when he sent a band
of assassins to murder Yoriiye in the Shuzen-ji monastery. However
that may be, there can be little doubt that the Hojo chief, in the
closing episodes of his career, favoured the progeny of his second
wife, Maki, in preference to that of his daughter, Masa.

Having "removed" Yoriiye, he extended the same fate to Hatakeyama
Shigetada, one of the most loyal and trusted servants of Yoritomo.
Shigetada would never have connived at any measure inimical to the
interests of his deceased master. Therefore, he was put out of the
way. Then the conspirators fixed their eyes upon Sanetomo. The
twelve-year-old boy was to be invited to Minamoto Tomomasa's mansion
and there destroyed. This was the lady Maki's plan. The lady Masa
discovered it, and hastened to secure Sanetomo's safety by carrying
him to the house of her brother, Yoshitoki. The political career of
Hojo Tokimasa ended here. He had to take the tonsure, surrender his
post of regent and go into exile in Izu, where he died, in 1215,
after a decade of obscurity. As for Minamoto Tomomasa, he was killed
in Kyoto by troops despatched for the purpose. This conflict in 1205,
though Hojo Tokimasa and Minamoto Tomomasa figured so largely in it,
is by some historians regarded as simply a conflict between the
ladies Maki and Masa. These two women certainly